


Unvorsum

by vinnie2757



Series: Superbia Drabbles [2]
Category: Homestuck
Genre: Alternate Universe - High School, Alternate Universe - Superheroes/Superpowers, F/M, Gen, dave does the dying thing, smooches, superbia au, teenage superheroes being teenagers
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-09-17
Updated: 2013-09-17
Packaged: 2017-12-26 21:08:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 4,480
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/970310
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/vinnie2757/pseuds/vinnie2757
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>You are Dave Strider and you have died a thousand times.</p><p>You are Jade Harley and your skin burns with a thousand suns.</p><p>[Superbia drabbles ported from tumblr.]</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Inauspicious Greetings

**Author's Note:**

> Title is a Latin word coined by Lucretius in his book, On the Nature of Things, and is the origin of the word 'universe'.
> 
> The AU is Superbia, a superpower AU, and you can find out about powers and the school over at http://superbiastuck.tumblr.com

You realise you have a power when you resurrect a crow you accidentally killed. You were thirteen, and the crow didn’t seem too thankful for you lunging out of nowhere and grabbing it, yanking it out of the way. As it pecked at your hands in an attempt to get free, you told it that you had saved its life, that it was alive because of you.

It might just be a crow, but that’s a nice feeling. Knowing you can save people. Keep them alive.

(When you meet Dirk, when you see the dark circles under his eyes, puffy and sore and bruised into his skin, you take a step back, look at yourself and at the things you had planned to do, the ways you’d planned to save everyone, the way you’d prepared every contingency and every possible twist and turn and alternate event, and you think. Oh. Oh, I need to stop. So you did. You stopped, you learnt to go with it. To take each day as it comes. To never become – become what? What was Dirk? He wasn’t _evil_ , not in so many words. But he was – he was – something was wrong with him. The day Jane – well, the day she – the day that – that was a dark day for everyone.)

It’s around the time you meet Dirk that you stumble across Harley. Literally, since she was asleep in the fucking hallway like a dog. As you righted yourself, face pressed against the wall and cheek red, you looked back at her, in a heap of gangly limbs and messy uniform and wayward hair, and oh.

Girls, you think, and rip a piece of paper out of your notebook to write a note to her.

**lost girl reward for finder**

You think you’re funny. You aren’t.

She manages to track you down. You aren’t sure how she managed that, because there was nothing to indicate it was you.

‘You don’t use grammar,’ she told you when your eyebrows arched over the rim of your shades. ‘You think you’re so clever.’ She growls, and stomps off.

Rose tells you that you are the most pathetic boy she has ever encountered, and that’s including that asinine crush John has on her.

(‘We all know that when the day comes that Karkat is able to nullify his Touch of Death,’ she said, in that preaching sort of tone she adopts, the lecturing, really fucking annoying tone that makes you squint at her in hopes that it shuts her up. ‘John will be all over him, assured heterosexuality aside.’)

You have a class called Theory of Relativity that is about as related to the theory of relativity as you yourself are. Maybe, you don’t know, you kind of stop paying attention after about five minutes, because Jade Harley is sat in front of you with her crazy devil-may-care island-girl messy hipster hair, and it is _everywhere_ and you kind of want to touch it. It just looks really soft, for all the tangles, it looks like it might be silk between your fingers. Your bro would be ashamed if he caught you fawning all over a girl like this, caught you playing with the edge of your notebook, causing paper cut after paper cut after paper cut because you’re too busy staring at a wayward strand of hair that curls in a different direction to the rest, looped outside of the mass. You have no time to pay attention to the blood all over your notebook because you desperately want to push that hair back into place alongside the rest.

But you don’t, because that would be uncool. You sit there, and you watch it shift, watch her hair fall over one shoulder then the other as she tilts her head. If life were one of those weird furry animes that keep showing up in your browser history, she’d have big twitchy, over-exciteable puppy dog ears perched in the middle of her hair.

(You don’t tell her that the dog ear headband that shows up on her bed one day around the time of her birthday was a present from you, not even years later when most of the fur has worn off them and the headband has snapped so many times that it is a latticework of superglue. She’s never told, but you suspect she knows anyway. Apparently you light up or some other cliché bullshit when she’s happy.)

 One day at lunch, she catches you watching her from your spot on the bleachers. You pretend that you aren’t looking, but she’s wrestling with Jake and she’s watching you watch her, and she gets pinned. It’s a total joke, you know, because Jake had been losing up until that point. She comes marching over, dust in her hair and grass-stains on her chin, and blames you for her defeat.

You don’t know why you say it, but you tell her that she could always wrestle you any day, especially if it was between the sheets.

The nurse tells you that you have a concussion, gives you an icepack for the swelling, and sends you on your way.

 In the corridor outside, you meet that weird fish dude. The one that makes your skin tighten, makes your head ache, the one that feels so incredibly wrong, like there’s a line of perfectly straight, equal red lines, and suddenly there’s a horizontal blue line. Being around him feels like a skipping record, like there’s a bit of grit in the groove. There are a dozen metaphors for the way that Eridan Ampora makes you feel, but none of them fit.

The thing that bothers you most right now is the two scratches covering the length of his face from temple to pronounced Greek nose to sharp, regal chin, the thing that bothers you about them is that they are obviously fresh, the skin parting a little where the scratches are, but there is no blood. You know wounds like that, you know skin-splitters. He should be dribbling that royal blood of his, but there’s nothing. Nothing at all. There’s a little ooze, maybe, a little purple-tinted pus, but there’s _not_ _any blood._

‘Women,’ Eridan says when he sees the icepack you’re holding. ‘Everyone’s heard.’

You snort, and wince at how it makes your nose ache. Damn her.

‘Women,’ you agree, and you go your separate ways, he to the nurse’s office, and you to the dormitories.

John comes to find you after you don’t go down to dinner and tells you that the whole of your class has heard, and he finds the whole thing hilarious.

‘She got you,’ he chortles, rolling around on his bed. ‘She got you good.’

You glare at his stupid ruffled hair and his lopsided glasses and his stupid, stupid buckteeth and swing your legs over the side of your bed so you face away from him.

In the morning, when you’ve healed over the worst of the clout upside the head, you go and grit out an apology to Harley for the “unwarranted solicitation” that you gave her.

She admits, over a lunch that you weren’t aware you’d agreed to, that she only hit you because everyone was gasping and to be honest, she didn’t immediately understand what you’d meant until Rose explained it to her that night once everyone had gone to bed.

‘Oh,’ you say. ‘Um. I’m sorry.’

She laughs, and it’s not really a very pretty laugh, it’s actually quite annoying, but you kind of fall a little bit in love with it anyway.

You sit there, watching her chop up her sandwich into tiny little bite-sized portions, watching the way she very pointedly sticks her little finger out. You wonder who taught her manners, and you cover your mouth and cough, try to pretend that you aren’t smiling at how sweetly ridiculous she looks.

Over the next few months, you find yourself sticking closer and closer and closer to Harley until one day you find yourself waking from a nap. Her fingers are in your hair, massaging behind your ears the way she probably rubs her dog’s head. That wouldn’t be a problem, really, because it feels quite nice, especially in the red-raw spots where the arms of your shades have dug in, and the tug at your hair actually feels pretty therapeutic. No, the problem is that your head is in her lap, your nose pushed up against the belt of her skirt.

You bolt upright, and she blinks at you, calling your name as you practically throw yourself out of the room, skidding on the carpet and landing in a heap in the corridor outside. When you can bring yourself to stop macking on the floor, you find the spider bitch grinning down at you.

She doesn’t say anything, and neither do you, hurrying off down the corridor and rubbing at your carpet-burnt nose in shame.

The next day, you shove a frog-shaped post-it down the back of Harley’s shirt, a note scrawled on it.

(You won’t tell her that you cut it out especially for her.)

**sorry for being gay**

_That’s okay!!!!_ comes the reply back all curlicues and swirls beneath your chicken scratch, _it’s okay to be gay - John is very handsome, after all!!! Xoxoxo_

(Harley is a grade-B asshole, Karkat tells you years later as you sit on the bleachers and watch the boys play their sports. She’s all sugar and spice and all things nice, and then she pulls the rug out from under you and shoves your head down the toilet. An explicit sort of metaphor, but those are the best.)

After Dirk tells you to get over yourself – you’d taken to hiding out in the workshop with him, watching as he builds a little robot rabbit, and you get your hands slapped with everything from his hand, to a screwdriver, to a spatula he just showed up with one day and never returned – you return to your place napping in Harley’s lap as though you’d never been away.

One day, you call her Jade, and she gives you this little smile, this cute little thing that’s all Cupid’s Bow and a flash of teeth, the sort of pouty-mouthed smile you saw in your Bro’s magazines when you used to sneak into his room whilst he was at work. That’s it you think, you’re gone, she’s got you, you’re hers, and you lunge up from space by her feet to kiss that smile.

She laughs against your lips, tilts her head with her stupid, silken hair falling over her shoulder, and that smile curls your lips in turn, makes you smile that smile you have only ever, ever given her.

‘You’re still gay,’ she whispers, and you, David Elizabeth Strider, you laugh. 


	2. Drapery

There is something about the night in this school, in this building so old and so familiar. It feels like every brick and every drop of mortar has absorbed the students powers, absorbed the laughs stolen under bed-sheets and the fears scribbled on scraps of paper to be shoved between cracks in the tiles and the floorboards, has taken on the identities of the hundreds of students that came before. With the night so still and so perfect, moon hanging like a secondary guardian to the white marble statues littered about the courtyards, gargoyles of cats and dogs and ancient men that were paid only in their loyalty to these anomalous children they had sired, it is easy to forget. To forget that you are meant to be a knight, a boy in armour standing tall and proud and ready to protect all those you love, all those you have grown to care for so deeply.

Jade’s fingers brush across the scars left by dead timelines, dancing across the pock-marks of bullet holes, and the raised white scratches of sword and knife and claw, the discoloured patches where broken ribs lay healed and aching, the smashed bones from hammer and fist. You have seen hate and pain and you have seen the damage that fear will bring, and as her nails scratch through the hair beneath your navel, a noise so loud in this cloaked silence above your head, you know that you do not fear.

There is a scar under your jaw, buried beneath the hinge and sometimes, when you forget to shave, you can’t see it at all because it is covered by that peach fuzz you grow and pretend is a beard, and you forget about it sometimes, because how often do you look under your jaw? Not often. Jade remembers it though; she knows that scar the best, because that is a scar you got for her, just her, the very first. She remembers it more clearly than you do, but even her memory is hazy, a long-passed dream of a time that got rewritten. You died for that scar, and she, lanky and yet still so small beneath your growth spurts and faked six-feet of height, fits perfectly against you to kiss that scar. If you could feel anything there, you might feel a rush of warmth from her lips, but all you feel now is the heat of her breath as she sighs, settles against you.

‘There are a lot of stars tonight,’ she tells you, and you remember the first night you found her staring up at those stars, looking so happy, so at peace.

You are above the clouds here, floating aimlessly across the skies whilst you train and hone and practice, and learn to blend in, to be these undercover heroes you used to read so much about under your ironic Hello Kitty blanket that you’d loved so much. She told you about herself that night, as you moved to lie beside her, between two pillars of white marble hounds, sitting so neatly, but carved with such sadness, such poise that you could almost feel anger coming from them, anger that increased as your fingers laced through the knots of Jade’s memories. She told you that she had come from an island in the middle of nowhere, an island so far out to sea that her grandfather, when applying to send her to this floating island of a boarding school, had to lie about her US citizenship. You think you made a joke about her being one of those immigrants you hear ruin everything, but then her hair’s a curtain around you, stars and galaxies and her eyes are suns of green fire, and she’s kissing you, and her nationality is the least of your concerns.

‘There are no clouds,’ you reply, and she huffs that laugh of hers, pokes your nose with a fingertip, and you tilt your head to pretend to bite at it.

‘I worry about the stars,’ is whispered in your ear after a moment, and you look up at her, frown a little. ‘I worry about what they’re doing.’

It is not often that Jade gets morose, gets to thinking about the nature of her existence, and you put her on her back, settle against her, ear against her heart and her leg hooked about your waist, a living, breathing body pillow made just for her. You don’t believe in Fate, but sometimes you think that perhaps it had a plan for you even so, and that plan involved you, Jade Harley and no clothes.

‘Chilling out, probably,’ you say, and her hand rests against your ear, fingers knotted into your hair. ‘They’re probably watching over us, like the guardians and shit.’

‘Yeah,’ she whispers, and her nails create crescent moons in your scalp. ‘Probably.’

You pull out of her embrace, leaning over her to watch and admire and look at the way the moon casts shadows across her face. She looks skeletal here, like this, cast into a relief that the photographer in you wants to capture, wants to preserve, but this Jade, with the galactic circle of her hair the same white as yours in this light, the white you always thought the Milky Way was, this Jade is yours, just yours. No one else is allowed to see her like this, and she thinks the way you have claimed her is adorable. Really, she’d whispered as she’d taken everything you could have possibly given her, burying her hands so deep and ripping out everything you had pretended to be, leaving you bare and open and _hers_ , really it’s the other way around.

Alpha, she calls you, a teasing nickname that somehow managed to find its way amongst your classmates. It sent Equius scurrying off to his workshop in such a mess that only Nepeta could pull him free, and Dirk just gives you this _look_ , and oh you hate him, because you hate all family members that aren’t your Bro, and this poser that looks so much like him, this distant cousin from somewhere that isn’t Texas even though he has the accent and the mannerisms and the skewed Southern moral compass, he is an asshole. But whatever, you don’t care.

Her eyes are so pale tonight, a dying fire, and you brush your thumb across the broad arch of her cheek, looking so high and so sharp with the concave shadow of her cheek, but no, she’s just as round as ever, just as soft, and she smiles a little, sad.

‘Babe,’ you say, because you have never had command of your words around her, not since the day you met. ‘Talk to me.’

‘I’m scared,’ she whispers, and you blink at her.

‘Scared? You?’

‘Terrified,’ she smiles, and takes a breath.

 You had been young when Bro died, barely even a teenager, and you had never had this conversation, the _my-girlfriend-is-having-an-existential-crisis-what-do-I-do_ conversation. She knows that you are not nearly as prepared for life you pretend to be, you are not half as cool as you think you are, and she understands that you are not very good with comforting people, prone to rambling about something unrelated in a poor attempt to distract, to numb the pain of whatever ails them.

So you do the wise thing, and say nothing, instead leaning in to press foreheads and noses, and eventually lips, trying so hard to channel whatever peace this floating island has absorbed, to obtain whatever you can to pass it on to her, to cool off the supernovas screaming through her veins, the black holes forming in mind and heart and soul, draining the fires that you have loved for so long.

Jade is not supposed to be in your room, because your corridor is supposed to be boys only, because of some gender boundary bullshit, but everyone sneaks everyone else into their room so who even cares. John knows to give you space, knows that you need quite, private time with Jade, so he’s gone to stay somewhere, you don’t know, don’t much care, so long as he doesn’t go crawling into Karkat’s bed, because then he’ll either die or have nightmares and come screaming to you whilst you are in the middle of something and you really do not have time for that right now.

Your priority is, and has always been, Jade, and making sure that she is safe. She has had the best start of you all, has been practicing her powers since the day she was born, but everything else has proven difficult for her, the socialising and the living in a civilised, structured environment. She struggles, and you wonder, as she clutches at you, gasping your name, the litany of a prayer, and you wonder if she’s every prayed the rosary, because that’s what she sounds like right now, you wonder if she’s ever regretted it. She could have stayed on her island with her grandfather, and lived out her life there without ever worrying about other people.

The thought of your life without her, the thought of being here without getting to shove toy frogs down her dress and watching her beat Jake in wrestling matches, that hurts, and you bury your face in her neck so that you can pretend for a moment like it doesn’t.

After your brother’s death became a paradox, one of the few moments locked in time that you can never ever return to, Jade was the first person you went back in time to save. You would – and have, and will continue to – die a hundred times for her, and neither of you really remember it, a post-script in the notebook of your timelines, scribbled in the margin with a green pen, curlicues and smiley faces.

_Everybody lives_.

You think to yourself, as you lie there, panting into her neck and breathing in the smell of her sweat and day-old perfume and the shampoo clinging to the hair stuck to her skin, you think that it is a good thing neither of you clearly remember what happens.

The first time you saved her, she’d been stabbed in the gut, and it had pierced her stomach, just enough that it sliced clean through the lining and tore it open. You remember how she’d been stabbed, you remember what the wound was, because you shoved her out of the way at the last second to take that wound yourself.

(Rose tells you that Jade was banned from missions for several weeks following because she tore your past-self’s murderer to pieces. Quite literally to pieces, because Jade had been learning about materials, that had been her focus of study, and she knew how to dismantle the skin and muscle and bone of that lizard man. She knew, and she did it, and she revelled in the destruction of your murderer. Jade tells you that she doesn’t really remember it, she just remembers how angry she had been, how hurt that you had died.)

‘Time’s weird,’ you whisper a while later, and she laughs, runs her hand through your sweaty hair to comb it off your face.

‘It is,’ she whispers back, and gets up to pull on her knickers and your hoodie, go out onto the balcony of your room.

For a few moments, you watch her back move as she stretches, just enjoying the view, but then you’re finding your boxers and going to joining her. On the fourth floor as you are, no one will see you, because you are the oldest students in the school now, all the new students are on the floors below, and you have seen literally everyone in your class in varying states of undress, you’re old enough to not care anymore. You all have a body, and you all have the same body parts.

Jade looks at the stars and you play with her hair, and at this altitude, you really shouldn’t be out here dressed like this, it’s cold for it, but you find yourself warm all the same, and there’s a dome or something above your heads, an invisible force-field keeping the air warm and dry and perfect for you all.

‘You’ve been off all day,’ you say, looking at her with her moonlight-grey skin, and her wild island-girl hair, eyes so blind and so bright. ‘Talking about the stars and shit.’

She sighs. ‘I’m scared,’ she admits, for the second time, and you frown. ‘Of the stars.’

‘Why?’ you ask, and turn your gaze to the stars above your heads, ‘they’re too far out, aren’t they? They can’t get to us, right?’

She nods, leans on the railing, back curved just right to push her hip against yours. Her hair tumbles over her shoulders, a brook of coal, a shattered solar system tumbling into the black hole of the night around you.

‘They’re too far out,’ she echoes, and she’s not looking at them anymore, instead looking out at the marble statues littering the courtyard. ‘They just watch us.’

‘Then why are you scared?’ you ask. ‘Nothing can hurt the stars.’

‘I could,’ she says, and turns to sit on the railing. You move to stand between her legs, hands on her hips to steady her as she wraps her arms around your neck. ‘I could pull them all from the sky. They’re just gas. Plasma. Whatever. The point is; I know what they’re made of. I could destroy them.’

‘But you won’t,’ you say, and kiss at her slumped collarbone. ‘You’re better than that.’

‘But I could. That’s too much power for one person to have. I could pull you apart, and rearrange you into something completely different.’

‘A potato,’ you offer, an attempt to make her laugh. It doesn’t work.

‘Dave,’ she sighs, and rests her chin on your head. ‘I could kill everyone I’ve ever known, I could tear down this school, this island.’

‘But you won’t,’ you repeat, and you hate that you don’t sound so sure.

‘I don’t want this power,’ she whispers, and you squeeze her tight. ‘It shouldn’t exist. People shouldn’t have this kind of ability, this amount of power.’

You sigh, and pull her head down to rest in your neck. ‘I trust you,’ you whisper in her ear, ‘you won’t use that power for bad shit.’

‘But what if,’ she whispers, tight and high. ‘What if something happens? What if someone manages to steal my powers? What if someone manages to manipulate me? What if Gamzee gets into my head? Or Vriska?’

Your fingers tighten in her hair, pull a few strands free. You won’t allow that, you promise her, no one will hurt her. Not a single person. You will kill them if they try it. You swear, whispering hot and quick in her ear, that you will never let her die again, you will never let anything bad happen to her, you won’t, you won’t, you won’t.

She starts sobbing when you fall silent, clutches at you and wails, and all you can do is hold her, because what else is there for you to do except hold her close and let her work it all out of her system, let her cry until she’s got nothing left.

It is not often that Jade Harley breaks, determined as she is to be a positive force for you all, but you know that it’s hard, that she struggles.

‘I’m scared too,’ you admit, when she’s quieted to sniffles. ‘I’m scared that one day I’ll lock your death like I did my Bro’s. I’m scared that I might lose you forever. Or John, or Rose, or anyone. What if I fuck up so badly trying to make things right that I lose you?’

She’s quiet, and you sigh against her neck, ruffling her hair. The night carries on around you, silent and still, with the walls of this old school, centuries in the making, absorbs your fears, her tears and the tense worry in your gut, and adds it to the reserves.

 


End file.
